DPA enthusiast and film sound guru Alex Joseph has once again been adding his sonic magic to some of the hottest box office hits of the moment. These include the just-released Hannibal Rising and the latest James Bond film, Casino Royale, which scooped the 2007 BAFTA for Best Sound.
 
As usual, Joseph went to great lengths to obtain the sounds he knew would work throughout each film. For Hannibal Rising he created some spectacularly gory and gruesome effects, visiting a Chinese supermarket in Soho to obtain pigs’ hearts, sides of beef, racks of ribs, grapefruit, coconuts, melon, celery and sugarcane, and retreating with his stash to London facility Soundelux.
 
“We used knives, cleavers, hacksaws and scalpels - with DPA 4060 high sensitivity and 4062 extra-low sensitivity miniatures mounted on the blades - to slice these things up,” says Joseph, who also cracked open a coconut to recreate the sound of a head being bashed in, snapped celery and sawed sugarcane to emulate bones fragmenting, and dunked a DPA miniature – protected by a condom – into a tub of fish guts.
 
 
Alex Joseph recreates some of the gory sounds for Hannibal with some props from the butchers. “In one sequence Hannibal cuts his finger which his aunt then sews up,” he continues. “We tried stitching a piece of meat, but found that cotton thread doesn’t make enough noise, even through a DPA. So I bought some coarse ribbon and a thick fishing needle and used that instead, for a very intense stitching sound.”
 
 
For another scene, Joseph used DPA’s Hydrophone underwater mic at the request of supervising sound editor Oliver Tarney. This captured the sound of Hannibal dunking an adversary into a vat of formaldehyde from a gibbet. This required an underwater recording of the victim’s screams, one from Hannibal’s perspective looking down at him, plus the sound of the machinery lowering him down. For this sequence Joseph used the water effects pool at Universal Sound in Amersham. “
 
Other hydrophones have given me noise problems, but this was brilliant,” says Joseph. “The lower you go the more low end you get, and less problems with surface tension noise which can cause a splintering effect. So we rested it on the bottom of the pool, about 1.5 metres down. The Foley artist used an underwater megaphone, and he really does sound like someone drowning from an underwater perspective! We also had two DPA 4060s recording the ambience of the room, which also gave us a synched recording of the vocals both underwater and out of water, with great results.”

Joseph discovered that the winch used to operate the pool cover was perfect for recreating the mechanical sound of the gibbet using a pair of miniatures in binaural configuration. “The winch made a very whiney, screamy sound, giving a scary mechanical effect,” he says. “This produces a rather nasty emotional effect for the viewer, which is really important; hopefully when you watch this you’ll feel as if you’re the guy being lowered by the machine!”
 
DPAs also featured heavily in Casino Royale. Two 4060s were used as binaural mics inside Bond’s Aston Martin, with a 4062 capturing the lower end sounds of the exhaust and the engine respectively. “These recordings are invaluable because you’ve got different angles or parts of the sound covered in different areas of the recording, but all in the one recording,” says Joseph.
 
 
Another famous sequence is the building site chase. “We needed more than just a clang of Bond’s foot on metal, we also needed girder resonance to give the whole structure,” he says. This was recorded by the film’s sound designer Martin Cantwell and Joseph at Universal, once again using DPA’s miniature range.“ We dragged some girders into the studio and placed a 4062 on the inside to pick up the low-end resonance of the girder,” he says. “To get the foot sound we radio-miked a 4060 on the Foley artist’s foot and stuck a 4061 low sensitivity on the top of the girder to get the surface noise. The combination of those three tracks provides a really powerful sound when Bond is running - probably one of the best sound sequences we’ve ever done.”
 
 
A larger diaphragm DPA 4006 omni was used to capture the sound of pipes being knocked over at Hackenbacker in Soho, where most of the Foley was recorded. In the film the pipes are actually plastic, but to get a larger, metal sound, Cantwell and Joseph “bashed the hell out of some metal dustbins, and the 4006 gave us all those frequencies and weight that other mics can’t get. It was probably the most used mic for Foley on this film, because everything needed to sound so big. All the sounds in this film were either specially-recorded effects, location recordings or Foley - there were no library sounds used at all.”
 
It’s no surprise to learn that Joseph has a degree in psychology. “It’s turned out to be more useful to my career than one in audio engineering,” says Joseph, whose dissertation was on how sounds affect humans physically and emotionally. Judging by his filmwork, this is one college dissertation that has actually had some relevance in the real world.